This post was originally going to feature only photos of the river and canal from the rails, like the one below, but

then I decided to pair photos from the train toward the water with the opposite: photos from the water toward roughly the same land area where the rails lay and the trains speed.

Train shots are difficult because of speed, coatings on the windows, trees and poles along the tracks . . . but I’m quite sure a letter that begins “Dear Amtrak: could you slow down, open windows, and otherwise accommodate the photographers” would not yield a positive response.

I hope you enjoy this attempt on my part. And if you ever have a chance to ride Amtrak along the Hudson, Mohawk, and Lake Champlain . . . sit on the better side of the car; switch sides if necessary.

Of course, there are little known gunkholes in the backwaters of the sixth boro where fossils–living and inert–float. This one is off an inlet behind one island and concealed by another, a place easily missed, and if seen, it gives the impression of being off limits by land and too shallow by water, near the deadly bayou of Bloomfield. But with the right conveyance and attitude, it’s feasible if you’re willing to probe. And the fossils have names like . . .

Caitlin Rose. I don’t know much, but built in Savannah GA in 1956? Relentless. She’s before my time here, but I suppose she’s the one built in Port Arthur TX in 1950.

Dauntless .. . built in Jakobson & Peterson of Brooklyn in 1936, was once Martha Moran.

From right to left here, Mike Azzolinowas built for the USCG at Ira S. Bushey & Sons and commissioned as WYTM-72 Yankton in 1944. Moving to the left, it’s Charles Oxman . . .

was built by Pusey & Jones in 1940 and originally called H. S. Falk., and looked like this below, which explains the unusual wheelhouse today. She seems to have come out of that same search for new direction as David, from a post here a year ago.

The low slung tug that dominates the photo here is Erica, and beyond here is a Crow.

Someone help me out here?

And as far into this gunkhole as I dared to venture . . . this one is nameless.

Oh the stories that could be told here! I hope someone can and will. Balladeers like Gordon Lightfoot could memorialize these wrecks in a song like “Ghosts of Cape Horn,” which inspired a tugster post here years ago. And looking at the last photo in that old post, I see Wavertree, which leads me to this art- and detail-rich site I don’t recall having seen before.

Vessels are just machines, but I prefer to anthropomorphize them, and thus miss them when they go. On this transition day, I want to acknowledge some vessels that I’d come to enjoy seeing but will now transition away .

Scotty Sky is a Blount design, launched as L. G. Laduca in 1960. I took the photo in January 2011. Click here for a photo of this vessel operating on Lake Erie.

Patrick Sky is also a Blount design, launched as L. G. LaDuca II in 1966. Click here for info on her other names and identities. Both were built for West Shore Fuel of Buffalo, NY, and named for the family of company president, Charles G. Laduca. Click here to see a 150′ version of these Blount boats. Click here to see an interesting but totally unrelated and now scrapped vessel called West Shore . . . fueling a steamer with coal.

Capt. Log is the smallest and newest of the now timed-out single-hulled tankers in the sixth boro. Click here for the recent Professional Mariner article on this vessel.

The three above vessels are still fully functional tonight, phased out notwithstanding. Crow, seen here in a photo from September 2011, was scrapped this year in the same location where

Kristin Poling, another single-hulled tanker seen here in a photo I took in March 2010, was scrapped two years ago. Click here for a number of the posts I did on Kristin.

Out with the old . . . in with the new, mostly because we have no choice, as time sprints on.

Notwithstanding all that . .. sometimes the thought that a day is the first day in the rest of one’s life is superlatively vivid. Enjoy my pics and maybe you’ll get this sense also.

Sunday afternoon, Zhen Hua 10 enters the Kills. Does anyone know if “Zhen Hua” means anything? Note Manhattan and the tip of Bayonne to the left, and tug Brooklyn, Robbins Reef Light, and the boro of Brooklyn to the right.

The new cranes arriving and the bridge their squeezing underneath are integrally related parts of the same story, as . . .

… are the cranes and the dredging equipment in the background. Note tug Specialist in the background

Margaret Moran tends the port bow.

Gramma Lee T Moran supplies the brakes and rudder.

The ship completes its journey of thousands of miles. Is it true that Zhen Hua 10 arrived here via Cape of Good Hope?

On the same theme . . here’s a handsome team of tugs, good paint all around. Working on a tandem assignment?

My thought when I read the name on the nearer tug was . . . this is historic . . . Crow‘s last ride; the Bushey tug might also be in the last mile of its thousands and thousands in a half century of work.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who will be transiting himself soon. Thursday I leave on a grand gallivant, and in early June–if all goes well– I start a new chapter working on Urger, that handsome young centenarian tug you see upper left at the top of the page.

A search for a photo assignment sent me to the August 2009 section of the universe, and these photos served as a cold water shock . . . how much stuff has changed in under five years. Crow of course is as “good” as gone, but do you know which tugs are attached to Freedom and RTC 28?

How about Vernon C on Freedom and

Janice Ann Reinauer? In 2009 there was as much demolition happening on the Brooklyn side as is now crumbling on Manhattan side.

And from the same week . . . K-Sea was still in full force here. Where is Greenland Sea today?

And this classic . . . Kristin Poling along with fleet mate . . .

John B. Caddell, which as recently as last week was still awaiting the torches and jaws of repurposing.

I’ve had these fotos from Seth Tane for quite some time. I looked at them today while culling fotos from my library. Foto shows Foss tugs moving the Sauvie Island Bridge span into position near Portland, Oregon. Foss tugs visible are (I believe) the larger PJ Brixand Jim Moore.

Like I said, I was scrolling through and culling my 2008 fotos. Joan McAllister . . . haven’t seen it in a long time.

Ditto Crow. Has she been scrapped?

Here’s a summer 2008 treat, tandem pushing Aegean Seaand Caribbean Sea, although still on Roehrig colors. The K-Sea colors on both have yet to come and by now both have been repainted.

Later in summer 2008 I took this, M/T Great Gull . . . now operating near the Panama Canal.

And . . . last one for today, Odin passing the stern of ITB Groton, also sold foreign. ITBs like Groton, obsolete now, were technically catamaran tugs. Just forward of where the stream of water is exiting the hull is the “bow” of the tug; look above it and you’ll see the “seam” where tug and barge conjoin. I posted about ITBs here back in late November 2007, and since

I’ve been enhancing my fotos on this blogs, let me add a few to that post here. Here I’m looking between the “hulls” of the catamaran and toward the stern. Note the portside prop. For scale, note the size of the “lift basket” and yard worker. The aftmost portside portion of the “barge” fits into the groove.

Here’s the aftmost port starboard side of the barge. These two fotos were taken in the Brooklyn Navy Yard GMD November 2007.

Thanks much to Seth for starting this 2007/08 flashback. I feel like a veritable John Titor after this glance back at how much the harbor has changed in five years. All fotos except otherwise attributed, are mine.

And totally unrelated . . . prepare to laugh yerself buttless bad lip reading the NFL. This one is a guaranteed laugh-producer too . . . what they really said in the first debate.

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